Take, for example, a piece in the most recent issue ofForeign Affairs, the main establishment journal, by Andrew Krepinevich, a West Point graduate with a PhD. from Harvard who has served on the personal staff of three Defense Secretaries and now heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments think-tank. Here is a key sentence:

"The challenges that China and Iran pose for U.S. security lie not in the threat of traditional cross-border invasions but in efforts to establish spheres of influence in, and ultimately to control access to, critically important regions."

Now, if that is how most Americans understand the supposed top two greatest threats the country faces, I’ll eat my foot. What the public sees constantly streaming on television, across headlines, and rushing out of politicians mouths is that Iran and China are outlaw states that are threats to the security of Americans. And that’s whypollinggenerallyshows Americans are troubled by these two threats.

5 comments:

delacrat
said...

"What the public sees constantly streaming on television, across headlines, and rushing out of politicians mouths is that Iran and China are outlaw states that are threats to the security of Americans."

It's instructive to remember how our Free World Free Press, not so long ago, acquitted itself in the lead-up to the Iraq war.

"...viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; with U.S. guests alone, the ratio increases to 25 to 1." And we know how that turned out.

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1145

OK Steve, here's my "high-quality question": Since the corporate media are not to be trusted with arguably the most important of issues. What from the Libertarian perspective is to be done about it? Term limits for news corporations? Public ownership of the airways? Should the "journalists" who ginned up the Iraq war be held to the same standards as Julius Streicher before they have us go quietly into the night of Iran and China ?

You either missed my point about public airwaves (or, more likely, I did not make it very well).

I was being sarcastic. Because we essentially have a corporatist government, "public" ownership of the airwaves IS corporate ownership.

Even prior to 1967 so-called public ownership was both a drag on innovation and a restriction to non-corporate ownership.

Even if you believe (which I don't, but let's make the argument) that this is a situation that requires government control/supervision/whatever, what happens if the government itself has been totally co-opted by corporations? You can't use the government to bring corporate greed to heel if the corporations are running the government.

That's what I meant, but I was rushing through the comment because I had somewhere else to be. Sorry.